Why would one create a social network?

It is clear that the world is going through a difficult time and many people need help making sense of it.

While the Internet has enabled a great flow of information, it has been difficult for many people to extract reliable information from online discourse, even if their friends know it. The previous generation of social media falls into an extreme of either overly aggressive censorship blocking true stories or life experiences of people or overly permissive policies enabling low quality content.

At the same time the underlying algorithms have been optimized for making people click on ads and "engage" with content. This has created a generation of doomscrollers with potentially negative mental health relationship to content.

YouTiki was created with the idea that a human being is more than just a vessel of advertizing consumption.

YouTiki is the next generation of an online social space.

On YouTiki upvotes MATTER. The more upvotes you get, the more power you have both globally as well as more influence your upvotes have on people close to you. The expectation here is that this will promote extremely high quality content as well as identify and reward people who important contributors to the network. On a social level, people who upvote each other's content would grow closer and see each other's content more as well as value each other's judgement more.

As far as moderation, we seek to strike a perfect balance of content management, where a hierarchial team of user moderators would catch any rare issues not caught by the Algorithm without the need of centralized involvement.

YouTiki is a collaborative space for sharing insights and information that your friend group find valuable.

At the core of YouTiki are topics and groups.

Topics have title along with comments. Anyone can make a topic and it doesn't belong to anyone. However, the content of the topics is a list of ranked comments. Comment ranking is affected by upvotes and the influence of people giving those upvotes.

The core of YouTiki's social structure are groups.

A very important limitation is that you can only BELONG TO one group. You can also MANAGE a group, meaning you can be affilliated with at most TWO groups on YouTiki. Each group has AT MOST 150 people.

Moderators of the group can approve requests to join and remove people from the group, they can also invite people by email. Each person who manages a group has 150 invites.

The moderators of the group you belong, the moderator of the group they belong to and so on and so forth, form a "chain of trust."

At the current time, you are only allowed to make comments if you belong to a group who have a chain of moderation that ends at the top level group. This restriction is in place to form a chain of trust for everyone who joins the network.

The ranking of comments is managed by the YouTiki upvote Algorithm. The Algorithm is unique to YouTiki. The Algorithm's revolutionary design meant to identify people who consistently produce content that is relevant to you, while maintaining a high level of quality accross the network.